Wakie wakie - how to wake up your students

Here are few tips how to keep your students awake:

10. As you are teaching, you notice many blank stares, open-mouths, and droopy heads. (Either A. Your lesson has fallen into the rabbit hole, or B. You have lost them.) Quick, have them stand up and give you ten jumping jacks or push-ups.

9. Require students to give answers in their best British accent. (Ok, we have heard enough about the Royal Wedding, but the students love it!)

8. When responding to a writing prompt, have the students drop their pencils on the ground when they have completed the task. You won’t believe how MANY giggles and guilty looks you will get.

7. Have Chuck Norris randomly appear in one of your Power Points roundhouse kicking a wolf. For some reason, students are obsessed with him. See, it got your attention, didn’t it?

6. Play a sound clip of the Mission Impossible theme, have them act as 007 until the music stops. Then, whoever they end up next to, that is their partner for the activity, or that is the person that they share their Think-pair-share answer with.

5. Place random discussion or reading comprehension questions on sticky notes underneath a handful of desks. When you are ready to ask questions, ask them to peek and read-aloud the questions. This works really well for introverted or shy students. Plus, they LOVE secret note passing.

4. Gift of a lifetime. On a large piece of tag board, find a snappy, powerful verb and write it down. Wrap it like a present. Set it in the middle of the room, and ask the students if they know what it is all about. Tell them that it is a gift-of-a-lifetime, a powerful verb they can add to their vocabularies. Give them twenty questions to figure it out. (I cannot take credit for this activity. I learned it at a seminar for Interactive Writing Lessons to Teach With the Smart Board.)

3. Have each student call on the next student to answer your lesson questions. This motivates them to stay focused, and they enjoy calling on others! (Inspired by my student teacher)

2. At the beginning of class on Mondays, ask if anyone has any crazy stories to share from the weekend. Explain that these are important narratives that need to be told!

1. Paste Calvin and Hobbs comics on tests or quizzes. Even though they are ridiculous, students look forward to, and sometimes ask, for them.

If anyone has more ideas to capture the wondering, daydreaming, (hormonal) minds of middle school students, I would love to read about them.

About the Author

Michelle Doman is a 7th and 8th grade Language Arts teacher at Brandon Middle School in Wisconsin's Rosendale-Brandon School District.  She is currently studying at University of Wisconsin Oshkosh to obtain a Master's in the Reading Specialist program.  You can connect with Michelle by visiting her blog, Save the Drama for your...Middle School Teacher?!

The following is a guest post from Michelle Doman, a 7th and 8th grade Language Arts teacher at Brandon Middle School in Wisconsin.

Tips and Ideas for Role-plays

Improvisation is a kind of a conversation exercise which is fun for the participants and entertains the rest of the class who serves as the audience.Here are some situations you can use:

1. You are in the restaurant. You have just had a good dinner. The waiter is waiting for you to pay the bill. You look for your wallet and find that you have left it at home.
2. The car in front of your car suddenly stops, and you cannot avoid hitting it. Both cars are damaged. The driver gets out of his car and comes towards you.
3. You are home alone. Suddenly the phone rings. You pick up the receiver and hear a strange noise on the other end of the line.
4. Your friend asks you to return a book that you borrowed from him several months ago. At first you cannot remember what you did with it. Then you explain why you kept the book for such a long time.
5. At the theater you discover that another person is sitting in your seat. You talk to him, explaining that he is in a wrong seat.
6. One day you get up early and go downstairs. There, to your surprise, is a stranger sleeping on the sofa. You wake your mother and ask her who the stranger is.
7. You visit a friend s house. After sneezing several times you realize that you are allergic to your friend s cat.
8. You are walking downtown with a friend. Suddenly you remember that you left some meat cooking on the stove at home

to be continued....

Those ten minutes left

We all have been fresh, hurried teachers at some point in our professional life. There are some times when an exercise turns out to be shorter than we thought, or we discover that our students have suddenly become desperate for "one more" activity.

What ever the cause might be, even the most relaxed professional checks the clock in panic from time to time. Rather than panicking, we should treat the five to ten minutes left as an opportunity to give our students extra doses of motivation. Here is an opportunity to play, review and show the students why you love English.

Here are some few ideas, fun ideas how to deal with these time gaps :

1. Always keep a picture, comic strip, or drawing at hand. You can use them for multipla activities, as a discussion about the subject, or imprompt role play of the situation etc.

2. Play a short session of an oral game like "animals,vegetable " /yes-no questions/, mime the word, I spy game, Simon says...etc

3.Recycle a topic you used for revision. Write a list of verbs, nouns, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions or any topic covered in previous lesson and have students to formulate sentences.

4.Taking to consideration the class level, vocabulary and structures already taught during the course, write 10 headless sentences /.......is used to water plants/ or 10 tailess sentences / A vase is a used to......../ Have two or more teams complete the sentences in three or four minutes. Finaly ask the students to read out loud the sentences and correct.

5.Write a simple sentence like "Today is a beautiful day ". Your students will have to expand it, by adding one or two words together. If someone suggest a sentence is incorrect is out of the game.

These are just few ideas collected by my experience, you may heard of them through another source, but the real issue is to try them out.

Start a list of your own activities, keep it in hand and make it grow. Maybe you will discover gaps in time are worth creating after all.